The Art of Thinking Clearly

This book is part of the non-fiction related to cognitive psychology that studies reasoning errors and mental traps (heuristics and bias) we fall into every day.

For what reasons? The most diverse and not all negative.

Reasoning errors are often due to “thinking shortcuts“, called heuristics, which we constantly use during the day, and which greatly facilitate our life; however, on certain occasions, these shortcuts drive us into error (bias) and bring to light our cognitive limits.

What are the error situations we can run into?

The author has identified dozens of them, which you can easily scroll through in the summary.

This book has some distinctive features:

1. Although referring to specific and authoritative studies, the author focuses primarily on the effects that cognitive errors can have on our decisions and personal performance;
2. The chapters are short and can be read quickly and easily, which is particularly useful when identifying measures to avoid a possible critical situation;
3. The author makes extensive use of critical thinking as a means to help the reader become aware of their own cognitive limitations, avoid at least the most common ones, and get out of the trap of easy illusions.

It is precisely the extensive use of critical thinking that might represent both a limitation and a strength at the same time; since, if on the one hand it helps us to unmask easy illusions, on the other it may undermine our dreams.

But if dreams can survive the test of critical thinking well,
they have a genuine chance of being realized.

Now, before going to the contents, here is a short video in which Rolf Dobelli, the author, introduces the book.

Summary

Introduction

1. Why you should visit cemeteries: survivorship bias
2. Does Harvard make you smarter? Swimmer’s body illusion
3. Why you see shapes in the clouds: clustering illusion
4. If 50 million people say something foolish, it is still foolish: social proof
5. Why you should forget the past: sunk cost fallacy
6. Don’t accept free drinks: reciprocity
7. Beware the ‘special case’: confirmation bias (part 1)
8. Murder your darlings: confirmation bias (part 2)
9. Don’t bow to authority: authority bias
10. Leave your supermodel friends at home: contrast effect
11. Why we prefer a wrong map to no map at all: availability bias
12. Why ‘no pain, no gain’ should set alarm bells ringing: the it’ll-get-worse-before-it-gets-better fallacy
13. Even true stories are fairytales: story bias
14. Why you should keep a diary: hindsight bias
15. Why you systematically overestimate your knowledge and abilities: overconfidence effect
16. Don’t take news anchors seriously: chauffeur knowledge
17. You control less than you think: illusion of control
18. Never pay your lawyer by the hour: incentive super-response tendency
19. The dubious efficacy of doctors, consultants and psychotherapists: regression to mean
20. Never judge a decision by its outcome: outcome bias
21. Less is more: the paradox of choice
22. You like me, you really really like me: liking bias
23. Don’t cling to things: endowment effect
24. The inevitability of unlikely events: coincidence
25. The calamity of conformity: groupthink
26. Why you’ll soon be playing mega trillions: neglect of probability
27. Why the last cookie in the jar makes your mouth water: scarcity error
28. When you hear hoofbeats, don’t expect a zebra: base-rate neglect
29. Why the ‘balancing force of the universe’ is baloney: gambler’s fallacy
30. Why the wheel of fortune makes our heads spin: the anchor
31. How to relieve people of their millions: induction
32. Why evil strikes harder than good: loss aversion
33. Why teams are lazy: social loafing
34. Stumped by a sheet of paper: exponential growth
35. Curb your enthusiasm: winner’s curse
36. Never ask a writer if the novel is autobiographical: fundamental attribution error
37. Why you shouldn’t believe in the stork: false causality
38. Everyone is beautiful at the top: halo effect
39. Congratulations! You’ve won Russian roulette: alternative paths
40. False prophets: forecast illusion
41. The deception of specific cases: conjunction fallacy
42. It’s not what you say, but how you say it: framing
43. Why watching and waiting is torture: action bias
44. Why you are either the solution – or the problem: omission bias
45. Don’t blame me: self-serving bias
46. Be careful what you wish for: hedonic treadmill
47. Do not marvel at your existence: self-selection bias
48. Why experience can damage our judgement: association bias
49. Be wary when things get off to a great start: beginner’s luck
50. Sweet little lies: cognitive dissonance
51. Live each day as if it were your last – but only on Sundays: hyperbolic discounting
52. Any lame excuse: ‘because’ justification
53. Decide better – decide less: decision fatigue
54. Would you wear Hitler’s sweater? Contagion bias
55. Why there is no such thing as an average war: the problem with averages
56. How bonuses destroy motivation: motivation crowding
57. If you have nothing to say, say nothing: twaddle tendency
58. How to increase the average IQ of two states: Will Rogers phenomenon
59. If you have an enemy, give him information: information bias
60. Hurts so good: effort justification
61. Why small things loom large: the law of small numbers
62. Handle with care: expectations
63. Speed traps ahead! Simple logic
64. How to expose a charlatan: Forer effect
65. Volunteer work is for the birds: volunteer’s folly
66. Why you are a slave to your emotions: affect heuristic
67. Be your own heretic: introspection illusion
68. Why you should set fire to your ships: inability to close doors
69. Disregard the brand new: neomania
70. Why propaganda works: sleeper effect
71. Why it’s never just a two-horse race: alternative blindness
72. Why we take aim at young guns: social comparison bias
73. Why first impressions deceive: primacy and recency effects
74. Why you can’t beat home-made: not-invented-here syndrome
75. How to profit from the implausible: the black swan
76. Knowledge is non-transferable: domain dependence
77. The myth of like-mindedness: false-consensus effect
78. You were right all along: falsification of history
79. Why you identify with your football team: in-group out-group bias
80. The difference between risk and uncertainty: ambiguity aversion
81. Why you go with the status quo: default effect
82. Why ‘last chances’ make us panic: fear of regret
83. How eye-catching details render us blind: salience effect
84. Why money is not naked: house-money effect
85. Why new year’s resolutions don’t work: procrastination
86. Build your own castle: envy
87. Why you prefer novels to statistics: personification
88. You have no idea what you are overlooking: illusion of attention
89. Hot air: strategic misrepresentation
90. Where’s the off switch? Overthinking
91. Why you take on too much: planning fallacy
92. Those wielding hammers see only nails: deformation professionnelle
93. Mission accomplished: Zeigarnik effect
94. The boat matters more than the rowing: illusion of skill
95. Why checklists deceive you: feature-positive effect
96. Drawing the bull’s-eye around the arrow: cherry-picking
97. The stone-age hunt for scapegoats: fallacy of the single cause
98. Speed demons make safe drivers: intention-to-treat error
99. Why you shouldn’t read the news: news illusion

Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Author Biography
A Note on Sources